1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to the field of keyboard user interfaces. In particular, the invention provides a multifunctional keyboard for a mobile communication device and method of operating the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
Advances in communication technology have created a convergence between the fields of data and telephony communications. Traditional communication devices, however, typically include two separate interfaces; one for telephony communication, and one for data communication. Other known communication devices utilize the limited character mapping available on a typical telephone keypad to perform data entry functions. For instance, current telephone keypads map keys to characters on a one-to-many basis: 12 keys (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, *, 0, #) correspond to 26 characters (ABC, DEF, GHI, JKL, MNO, PQRS, TUV, WXYZ). In addition, most such telephone keypads do not include many of the characters from the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) character code. In other known communication devices, including many cellular phones, data may be entered with a typical telephone keypad by repeatedly pressing a key to cycle through a number of associated character codes. For instance, repeatedly pressing the keypad key “2” on a typical cellular phone may cycle through the characters A, B, C, a, b, c, and 2.